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Dear Friends,just before the Libra Full Moon energy field has called for our immediate attention, we had been talking about “The Positive And The Negative Side Of Silence – Part I“, on April 06th. Within this piecewe clarified the collective definition of the word silence; established a spiritual understanding of “inner silence” as the lovelystate in which perception is no longer bound to the physical senses and emptiness becomes “the everything”; and we touched the dark side of silence – a lack of expression where human acts of injustice, abuse and imbalance are threatening to destroy life on planet earth. How incredibly relevant that observation was, was made very clear by the world events of the last seven days.

In the Libra Full Moon report I mentioned, that we should not underestimate the power that have been activated right now, as we are collectively in the process of the energetic preparation of a major shift in 2020. This driving forces of change, of new initiations, of physical action and responsible use of energies, trigger in us a higher awareness for our inner and outer relationship with the law, the creators of human laws,territorial ideas and concepts, foreign affairs – including refugees, immigrants andancestral / indigenous cultural wisdom!! This includes all limitations we feel, all limitations the system is showing, the evaluation of sense behind governmental regulations and a possible new definition of politics as much as leadership.
This being said, we have arrived at the truly dark side of silence – the refusal of the masses to stand up and speak out for what is truthfully right for a sustainable life, for all beings on planet earth. And that is what the whole term of creating the Golden Age of Aquarius is about!!! Personally I feel torn between a inner fascination with the speed and clarity in which things I write these days, unfold in my outer reality and a deep scare about that. Also there is a strong sense that we have to keep focusing on the direction we want this boat to go, otherwise the so called “leader of the world” could be quicker in destroying us.

Definition of silence according to the website dictionary.com
8. Military sense: to still (enemy guns), as by more effective fire.

This being human is a guest house. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor… Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
RumiThe Sound Of Silence written by Paul Simon performed by the bandDisturbed:Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping

And the vision
that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp

When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I – might teach you
Take my arms that I – might reach you

But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming

and the sign said,
the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
whispered in the sounds
of silenceDear Ones, I hope you are ready to disturb the sound of silence!!! I hope you are out there and roar with all your power, at every wrong doing brought to your awareness. Allow me to close this piece with a quote from Albert Einstein “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty”!!
Not So Quietly Roaring Blessings
Edith

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Over the last few month the spirit guides and angelic realm have dropped hints, that we collectively need to make a deeper inner connection with mother earth and our own human nature. With this profounder union in our bones and the chances for love that lasts, I am happy to introduce you to the characteristics of six animal spirit guides that enjoy having a mate for life!1.) The Wolfs
One of the most outstanding qualities of the Wolf is the ability of community building. Wolf packs are socially smart, deeply structured and highly organized animal communities. Indeed the wolf can energetically transmit to us, the understanding how Brotherhood of Men works, when we take the deeper animal nature of human beings into account. They can teach us how to stand our ground and defend our boundaries in an appropriate, not hurtful and clear way. An expression that still allows us to keep by heart relaying to another, when our opinions and personal needs go apart. Qualities we need if we want to ground a “love that lasts”. Wolfs have an air of inner freedom to them, even that they are deeply loyal and emotional intelligent in their relationships. Skills we need for the Golden Age of Love!2.) The Eagles
Eagles are messenger from the divine blueprint of our spiritual path on planet earth. Well known about this animals usual behavior is, that when trouble come down on us on planet earth, they simply rise and soar above all clouds. With this strength, they are helping us to develop states of higher consciousness, higher powers of communication and the ability to listen carefully to our intuition. Supported by the eagle medicine we are empowered to deeply ground our spiritual awareness, to purify our energy field and cleans old believe pattern. The eagle reminds us to integrate the awareness of the Hermetic Laws in our life, that all things material are build from the mind.3.) The Beavers
Beaver are the ingenious builder and constructor of new realities with stable foundations. They are representing the power how to step by step come from visions, burning desires, soul dream and insights; to an as stable experienced reality, that represents all this guidance in our life. They give us the encouragement and inspiration that we need, in order to reach our deepest desires and soul goals. Beaver are big team player in general, maybe that is why they have happy marriages ;-). They know how to make everyone in the team feel appreciated, respected and used according to their personal skills. Quite important abilities to develop for humanity too, in the collective awakening process.4.) The Coyotes
Personally I love the Coyote energy. I called my first dog Coyote for his cheeky character and childlike playfulness, even in old age. The Coyote is the clown of the nature realms, known for his trickster, shape-shifter, and transformer qualities. The Coyote tells us to be mindful of the impact of the hermetic laws in our actions. To raise our awareness for the inner self-sabotage system, that allows us to play tricks on ourselves and others (the illusion of Maya). Coyote also reminds us that the consequences of our actions effect more than just ourselves, as we are truly one on this planet and beyond. In his playful ways, he brings along endings and new beginnings, and therefor represents the cycle of life and death in nature.5.) The Ravens
The Ravens are representatives of the divine magic within the material world. They bring us higher awareness of the divine balance between the light and the dark side of existence. Wise as they are, they are master of the time and space continuum. A bridge between the underworld, the present moment on planet earth and the spirit realms. When in tune with the ravens medicine, we are moving through transitions and changes of consciousness more smoothly and from a place of inner ease. Profound healing created by the renewal of our energy are possible under the influence of the raven power. 6.) The Condors/New World Vultures
The vulture is all about rising to higher awareness, patience and resourcefulness. Like most of us, vultures like eating well, but they do not hunt! What they know to do best, it to seizes the chances and resources that show themselves as available. From them we can learn how to go from “working hard” for our dreams and soul desires; to allowing them to present themselves to us!! When we have the passion and clarity to plant our seeds well, the vulture medicine will help us develop the patience it takes, to receive. When we are about to develop new abilities or projects, the vulture is also bringing message to make sure we check our core values before we call new beginnings into manifestation! Vultures have well developed physical senses. They can smell fresh meat from miles away and have highly advanced vision. Connecting with the vulture medicine remembers us to trust our body, to also develop our higher physical senses and become one with nature within.

Dear Ones, I hope you enjoy this insides and find maybe also some guidance for your personal path in them. I hope you are motivated and will have fun developing a relationship with the animal spirit guides. Let your body teach you, motivated by the animal kingdoms loving guidance!
Love and Nature Blessings!!
Edith

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Dear Friends, over the last month the spirit guides have dropped hints that we collectively need to make a deeper inner connection with mother earth and our own human nature. This week now the Taurus New Moon brought us the energy field needed to ground all this new energetic connections into our physical body. Next question is how that will influence our society collectively. I would say by now there is no doubt, that human beings need nature for creative inspiration, inner peace and communion with spirit.
When we spend time in nature, our inner connection with the energy and vibration of all life on planet earth is growing. So if we accept that spirituality is supposed to lead us to authentic expression of unconditional love, compassion, and ethical ways of living, then spirituality necessarily leads us toward an inner need to take better care of the Earth than we are now doing as a global society. And now the collectively renewed energy field, allows much more people to feel a deeper and more tuned-in relationship with nature and mother earth.

In 2012 the Kogi people of the Sierra Madre in Colombia, shared their latest film, Aluna, sending out a warning to the world that we must change our path in how we treat pacha mama and the collective resources provided. They are a very old tribe, filled with indigenous wisdom, which lead to them having no interest in being studied by Westerns. They have not allowed anthropologists to live among them. And they have not allowed that their civilization becomes simply another object within ours. Maybe, because they can see thru the illusions the western world still expresses in the desire to conquer nature, which has destroyed the forests, rivers and mangrove swamps near their home.

A personal message to all my facebook friends!! FB is limiting the distribution of my posts daily more. If you resonate with my articles and are used to find my work shared in a group, rather sign up on my newsletter here to make sure you get the information!!! Over time I might not be able to put in the FB time, if it does not lead to what it is about – SPREADING THE WORD ;-)!Last year, on Thursday, April 30th 2015, four tribes in the amazon rain forest (the Munduruku tribe, the Apiacá people, the Kayabi tribe and the Rikbaktsa tribe) chose to overcome their own cultural differences, in order to stop the hydroelectric dams the Brazilian government was working on. The construction of dams had decreases the fishing stock, making it difficult to maintain the life of this indigenous people that are originating in the Amazon. They managed to issue a strong 30 joint statement, asking the Brazilian government to halt the construction of four hydroelectric dams on the Teles Pires cascade, a tributary of Rio Tapajós.

The indigenous people claimed “The government builds dams without ever finishing their environmental studies, and without awareness or respect for the consequences of the destruction of nature on our lives”. The authorization was issued for the construction of dams without giving response to the indigenous people, and leaving them with no fish, no water, no resources. The dams of the Teles Pires and Colider had already killed tons of fish and thousands of animals. And downstream of the dams the fish where dying, because of the sudden floodsand and uncontrolled lowering of the rivers “.

Oil drilling and fracking release toxic chemicals into the Earth that harm the surrounding ecosystems, plants, animals, and humans who live nearby.

Spraying our crops with pesticides and herbicides to increase production ultimately poisons the food that we eat; we still do not fully understand the long-term consequences these practices will have on our health, reproductive ability, and longevity.

Burning fossil fuels to support our dependence on motor transportation, air conditioning, and other conveniences, pollutes the air and increases the carbon in the atmosphere, which brings harm to every living thing on the Earth.

Remember the article “The Earth And Us Are One – Earthquakes, Volcano Eruptions & Human Passion“? There I shared insides about our inter-connected nature even with the weather expressions. As our dominant cultural mythology falls apart, we face repeated humiliation in the failure of our cherished systems of technology, politics, law, medicine, education, and more. By now. only with increasingly willful ignorance we can deny that the grand project of “civilization” has failed. Thanks God the needed humility to truly hear the messages of the indigenous people by heart, can be born of this humiliation. So it is on us right now, to turn the boat around and align our daily life with this awareness.

Dear Ones, the next collective step we need, is to focus our passion on planing and creating this world capable of hosting the Golden Age of Aquarius. To find back to harmony with the earth and oneness that moves us. I hope your activism is inflamed already! And that you are burning from within, for the preservation and sustainability of the mutual ground we are standing on!!! There is much each of us can do, from adapting our shopping habits, to raising inner awareness how we treat water and other natural resources,…
Love and Earth Blessings!!
Edith

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When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow
— Old Native American Prophecy

Dear Friends,the other day we talked about Soul Mates and Soul Families, about our collective shift to higher vibration andthe healing of our Family Tree. For many of us the past few days of the New Moon energy influence, have been a call to let go of the ties to our family pattern, and set ourselves free for the creation of the family tribes of our soul. And again it will be the Indigo Children, Crystal Children and Highly Empathic People, who hear this call into the Golden Age of Humanity first, and lead us the way.Since years I watch an increasing amount of young and incredible talented people in their habit of traveling the world as tribes. Most of them are Indigo and Crystal Children, expressing with this new type of “Hippy Movement” our collective desire to find the family of our soul and live with them according to our core values. All of us carry in our souls the knowledge, that a more beautiful world is possible. A memory of our true origin is encoded in our DNA, until one day it is awakened and our desire starts guiding the way. Just by existing as a multiracial, multinational family, this young people demonstrated their belief in the possibility of equality and peace on earth.
And many of this high vibrating beings truly have a contract with other souls to unite as one family of the heart, and play an active role in the transformation of humanity into The Golden Age of Humanity – the time we are in now. This agreements exist in the super-conscious of large soul-groups, the awareness of smaller collectives and between individuals. The people of this Soul Families will choose to come together despite their differences in service to humanity, in order to support the spiritual enlightenment and evolution of the collective human race. They will come together to consolidate the total knowledge of humanity as one, bring back together that which was split and live a life based on unity consciousness, indigenous wisdom from all parts of the planet and planetary sustainability. Knowledge will be shared freely, the divine feminine and the divine masculine will co-exist in equality and co-operation.
Another development for our near future is, that people will recognize a leader no longer as the one that talks the loudest, boasts of successes, or has the support of the elite. Leaders will be those whose actions speak the loudest, the ones that have shown wisdom, compassion, kindness and courage in challenging situations, and have proven that they work for the benefit of all beings. And this are qualities a lot of Indigo and Crystals naturally feel a need to develop, express and share with the world.Many prophesies have spoken of this time and the children of all colors and regions of the world, that will help unite humanity in their ONENESS of HEART. The following I especially enjoy:

“When the Time of the White Buffalo approaches, the third generation of the White Eyes’ children will grow their hair and speak of love as the healer of the Children of the Earth. These children will seek new ways of understanding themselves and others. They will wear feathers and beads and paint their faces. They will seek the Elders of the Red Race and drink of their wisdom. These white-eyed children will be a sign that the Ancestors are returning in white bodies, but they are Red on the inside. They will learn to walk the Earth Mother in balance again and reform the idea of the white chiefs. — Navajo / Hopi Prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow“

There will come a day when people of all races, colors, and creeds will put aside their differences. They will come together in love, joining hands in unification, to heal the Earth and all Her children. They will move over the Earth like a great Whirling Rainbow, bringing peace, understanding and healing everywhere they go. Many creatures thought to be extinct or mythical will resurface at this time; the great trees that perished will return almost overnight. All living things will flourish, drawing sustenance from the breast of our Mother, the Earth. The great spiritual Teachers who walked the Earth and taught the basics of the truths of the Whirling Rainbow Prophecy will return and walk among us once more, sharing their power and understanding with all. We will learn how to see and hear in a sacred manner. Men and women will be equals in the way Creator intended them to be; all children will be safe anywhere they want to go. Elders will be respected and valued for their contributions to life. Their wisdom will be sought out. The whole Human race will be called ‘The People’ and there will be no more war, sickness or hunger forever.” — Navajo / Hopi ProphecySo if you hear the call to be part of a family you might not even know jet, start listening to the little things your subconscious is whispering to you. Pay attention to your authentic core values and the ways how you need to be treated in order to feel safe and home with people. Don’t rush it, just hold the awareness in your heart, that there are others in this world with skills, attributes and soul desire – that match yours perfectly.

I hope this information helps you to be patient and hold your horses until the family of your heart and soul arrives in your life, to manifest the parts of the Golden Age of Aquarius – you are collectively dreaming of. Keep breathing deeply and keep walking in divine faith until the divine plan is beautifully unfolding in front of our eyes! Blessings an Faithful Patients! Edith

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by the way, these two lovely people are the couple from the Woodstock album cover…
still together by today!!

Aluna – Directed by Alan EreiraA black line, a network of hidden connections, links all the sacred places on earth. If that line should be broken, calamities will ensue, and this beautiful world shall perish. Destroying a forest here, draining a swamp there might have dire consequences across the globe. The Kogi shamans cannot perform their work of maintaining the balance of nature much longer in the face of our depredations.

Credit: gstatic.com.

How are we to interpret this warning coming from the Kogi people of the Sierra Madre in Colombia, delivered through their latest film, Aluna?Contemporary Western viewers may respond to the film with resistance and skepticism. The old guard will undoubtedly reproduce the violence of well-worn colonial discourses, dismissing the Kogi’s message as primitive magico-religious thinking. For the ethnically sensitive, such a crude dismissal is passé. Today we have more sophisticated ways to deafen ourselves to what the Kogi are telling us.
The first we might call “ontological imperialism.” It would be to say, “Yes, the Kogi are onto something after all. The black line is a metaphor for ecological interconnectedness. Their talk of the voice of water is code for the hydrological cycle. They are keen observers of nature and have articulated scientific truths in their own cultural language.” That sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? It gives them credit for being astute observers of nature. However, this view takes for granted that basal reality is that of scientific materialism, thereby disallowing the conceptual categories and causal understandings of the Kogi. It says that fundamentally, we understand the nature of reality better than they do.
If their message were merely, “We must take better care of nature,” then the above understanding would be sufficient. But the Kogi are inviting us into a much deeper change than that. Do we understand the nature of reality better than they do? It once seemed so, but today the fruits of our supposed understanding—social and ecological crisis—gnaw at our surety.

A second and related way that Western viewers may resist the Kogi’s message is through what Edward Said called “Orientalism”—the distortion (romanticizing, demonizing, exaggerating, reducing) of another culture to conform it to a comfortable and self-serving narrative. An Orientalist response to Aluna would seek to turn the Kogi into a kind of cultural or spiritual fetish object, subsuming them into our own cultural mythology, perhaps by making them into an academic subject and stuffing their beliefs and way of life into various ethnographic categories. In that way we make them safe, we make them ours. It is just another kind of imperialism.
We might do the same by inserting their messages into a comfortable silo called “indigenous wisdom,” elevating the Kogi to superhuman status and, in the process, dehumanizing them as well. It is not true respect to worship an image—the reverse image of our own shadow—that we project onto another culture. Real respect seeks to understand someone on their own terms.
I am happy to say that Aluna avoids both traps (of imperialism and Orientalism). What makes this film remarkable is that fundamentally it is not a documentary. I have always been a little uncomfortable with documentaries about other cultures, even those that avoid the overtly patronizing tone of “look at those happy natives,” because they of necessity objectify their subjects, turning them into the material of a (video) “document.” By documenting others, we incorporate them into our world, into a safe educational or entertainment or inspirational frame, and into the “society of the spectacle.” But this film is not a documentary.

Reversing Colonialism

Who is the filmmaker here? Ordinarily one would say it was Alan Ereira, a former BBC producer who produced it. But that’s not what he says, and that’s not what the Kogi say either. According to them, the Kogi noticed the accelerating degradation of the planet and contacted the outside world to deliver a message that we must stop the destruction. They did so first in the early 1990s with the BBC documentary From the Heart of the World, after which they again withdrew from contact.
Obviously, we didn’t heed their message. “We must not have spoken it clearly enough,” they concluded, and so they sought out Ereira again to make a sequel. Fittingly, this is not a masterly production in conventional terms. Ereira appears to be in a little over his head, guileless, uncertain, and humble. These qualities are palpable throughout and contribute to one’s confidence that the Kogi and their message have not been conveniently packaged for commercialization or ecospiritual objectification. It is a raw and honest film.
The cynical observer, practiced with the tools of post-colonial analysis, might think that the assertion that “the Kogi have requested this film be made in order to convey their message” is a mere cinematic trope, or a way to preempt charges of exoticism, Orientalism, and cultural appropriation. However, that analysis is itself a kind of colonialism, based as it is on the patronizing assumption that the Kogi must be the helpless pawns of the filmmaker. It discounts the Kogi’s own explicit assertion that they have called the filmmaker back in order to transmit an important message to “little brother” (the industrialized world).
Dare we take the Kogi at face value? Dare we hold them in full agency as authors not only of this film, but of a message sent to us on their initiative? To do so reverses the power relations implicit in even the most post-colonially sensitive ethnography, in which the distinction between the ethnographic subject and the ethnographer is usually preserved in some form (and institutionalized when, with all due disclaimers, it appears in academic publications). Anthropologists don’t normally grant ethnographic populations agency as the originators of messages to academia.
The Kogi are not interested in being studied. They have not allowed anthropologists to live among them. They have not let their civilization become an object within ours. They, in fact, have been studying us—and with increasing alarm. “We have warned little brother,” they tell us, “and little brother has not listened.”

The Gift of Humility

In one telling scene, the Kogi mama (shaman) Shibulata visits an astronomical observatory in England. The astronomer is struck by the fact that Shibulata evinces no desire to learn from Western science, no curiosity about the telescope. He shows him photographs of galaxies invisible to the naked eye. The mama is not impressed. He is here to teach us, not to learn from us. Perhaps he recognizes the telescope as another manifestation of the same desire to conquer nature that has destroyed the forests and rivers and mangrove swamps near his home. He also displays an uncanny power, picking out from a large photograph the single star in it among multitudinous galaxies and other objects. Naming it, he says, “That star is not visible to our eyes.”
In this film, the colonial gaze is turned back on the colonizers—sternly, imploringly, and with very great love. The Kogi tell us, “You mutilate the world because you don’t remember the Great Mother. If you don’t stop, the world will die.” Please believe us, they say. You must stop doing this. “Do you think we say these words for the sake of talking? We are speaking the truth.”
Why hasn’t “little brother” listened? It has been over twenty years since the Kogi first spoke their message to the modern world. I think perhaps we have not listened because we have not yet inhabited the humility that this film embodies. We continue to try to somehow box, contain, and reduce the Kogi and their message so that it can rest comfortably in our existing Story of the World. The Kogi themselves say that thought is the scaffolding of matter; that without thought, nothing could exist. The official Aluna website describes the Kogi’s view thusly: “We are not just plundering the world, we are dumbing it down, destroying both the physical structure and the thought underpinning existence.” The conceptual reduction of the Kogi, and indigenous groups generally, to academic subjects, museum specimens, New Age fetish-objects, exploitable labor, or tourist spectacles is part of this dumbing down.

Thankfully, the requisite humility to truly hear the Kogi is fast upon us, born of—what else?—humiliation. As our dominant cultural mythology falls apart, we face repeated humiliation in the failure of our cherished systems of technology, politics, law, medicine, education, and more. Only with increasingly strenuous and willful ignorance can we deny that the grand project of “civilization” has failed. We see now that what we do to nature we do to ourselves; that its conquest brings our death. The utopian mirage of the technologist and the social engineer recedes ever further into the distance.
The breakdown of our categories and narratives, the breakdown of our Story of the World, gives us the gift of humility. That is the only thing that can open us to receive the teachings of the Kogi and other indigenous people—to truly receive them, and not merely insert them into some comfortable silo called “indigenous wisdom,” as if they were a museum piece or a spiritual acquisition.
I am not suggesting that we adopt, part and parcel, the entire Kogi cosmology. We need not imitate their shamanic practices or learn to listen to bubbles in the water. What we must do is embrace the core understanding that motivates the attempt to listen to water in the first place: the understanding that nature is alive and intelligent, bearing certain qualities of a self that Western thought has arrogated to human beings alone. We must make it no longer an Other; we must grant to nature the same agency that this film humbly grants to the Kogi. Then we will find our own ways of listening.

What Does Nature Want?

The modern mind does not easily comprehend the idea of the intelligence of nature except through anthropomorphizing or deifying it—another attempt at conquest. That would impose upon nature the same neocolonial attitude that this film does not impose upon the Kogi, and it is contrary to their message. Living much closer to nature than we in industrialized society, the Kogi can be under no illusion that nature is always nice, fair, and pleasant. From a dualistic mindset, the putative “intelligence of nature” looks like a capricious, evil intelligence. If you or I were in charge, we’d do better, wouldn’t we? We wouldn’t arrange for 999 tadpoles out of a thousand never to achieve froghood. We wouldn’t write so much suffering and death into nature. We would improve on nature. Such is the conceit of civilization as we know it.

To the extent we participate in modern society, “you and I” have been in charge. Look at what has happened to the world. Maybe it is time for younger brother—to see through different eyes.

Granting subjectivity and agency to nature and everything in it does not mean to grant human subjectivity and human agency, making them into storybook versions of us. It means asking, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the planet want?”—questions that seem crazy from the perspective of nature-as-thing.
The Kogi are not talking about a non-material, supernatural spirit to infuse consciousness into otherwise dead matter. For the Kogi, matter is not a container for thought; matter is thought made manifest, the thought of the Mother. Their beliefs are not actually supernatural, not in the sense of abstracting spirit (and all that goes with it like sacredness, consciousness, etc.) out from matter. To do so denies the inherent beingness of nature just as much as standard scientific materialism does.
Materialism, however, isn’t what it used to be. Science is evolving, recognizing that nature is composed of interdependent systems within systems within systems, just as a human body is; that soil mycorrhizal networks are as complex as brain tissue; that water can carry information and structure; that the earth and even the sun maintain homeostatic balance just as a body does. We are learning that order, complexity, and organization are fundamental properties of matter, mediated through physical processes that we recognize—and perhaps by others we do not. The excluded spirit is coming back to matter, not from without but from within.
So the question, “What does nature want?” does not depend for its coherency on anything supernatural, an external intelligence. The “wanting” is an organic process, an entelechy born of relationship, a movement toward an unfolding wholeness.

A Non-Utilitarian Argument Against Ecocide

In that understanding, we can no longer cut down forests and drain swamps, dam rivers and fragment ecosystems with roads, dig pit mines and drill gas wells with impunity. The Kogi say, to do so damages the whole body of nature, just as if you cut off a person’s limb or removed an organ. The well-being of all depends on the well-being of each. We cannot cut down one forest here and plant another there, assuring ourselves through the calculus of net carbon dioxide that we have done no damage. How do we know that we have not removed an organ? How do we know we have not destroyed what the Kogi call an esuana—a key node on the black thread scaffolding the natural world? How do we know we have not destroyed a sacred tree, what the Kogi call “the father of the species,” upon which the whole species depends?
Until we can know it, we’d best refrain from committing further ecocide on any scale. Each intact estuary, river, forest, and wetlands that remains to us, we must treat as sacred, while restoring whatever we can. The Kogi say we are close to the dying of the world.

As the film makes clear, science is beginning to recognize what the Kogi have always known. An invisible web of causality does indeed connect every place on Earth. Building a road that cuts off the natural water flow at a key site might initiate a cascade of changes—more evaporation, salinization, vegetation die-off, flooding, drought—that have far-reaching effects. We must understand that as exemplfying a general principle of interconnectedness; furthermore, we must see the aliveness and intelligence of the world. As the Kogi say in the film, “If you knew she could feel, you would stop.”
Otherwise, we are left only with the logic of instrumental utilitarianism as reason to protect nature—save the rainforest because of its value to us. But that mindset is part of the problem. We need more love, not more self-interest. We know it is wrong to exploit another person for our own gain, because another person is a full subject with her own feelings, desires, pain, and joy. If we knew that nature too were a full subject, we would stop ravaging her as well.Aluna brings this knowing a little closer. Only by hardening our hearts can we view the film’s images of filled-in swamps and bare, scarred mountains, and disbelieve that something is feeling very great pain. Only by the colonialistic dismissal of an entire culture’s cosmology and ways of knowing, can we uphold our own dying mythology of nature as an insensate source of materials and repository of wastes. The sober indignation of the Kogi defies easy dismissal. It is not hard to believe that they—the largest intact civilization that has remained separate from global industrialized society—are indeed “Elder Brother.” It is not hard to believe their warning. To act on it, though, might require the same courage, patience, and wisdom the film reveals in the Kogi.